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Topic: Regarding yeast starters... (Read 1909 times)

Just wondering about folk's preference. When you prepare a starter do you pitch the entire volume to your wort or do you pour off the starter beer and just pitch the slurry? I've been pitching the whole thing worried that if I dump the beer much of the slurry will end up stuck to the side of the flask instead of in the wort. I appreciate your points/counterpoints as always.

I think you'll find that the standard advice is to pour off most of the starter fluid, but retain enough to swirl the slurry loose and pour that into your wort. But I go ahead and dump the whole thing since I typically make the starter with a small mash of the same base malt in my brew. But I'm sure I'm gonna read why that's a bad idea now.

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Is that a counter-pressure bottle filler in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

I usually chill and decant, especially if it's more than a 1L starter. That starter beer was not fermented under ideal conditions and usually doesn't taste very good so I'd rather keep a large amount of it out of my batch.

I noticed the mention of pouring off the spent wort (its not really beer due to the amount of aeration I provide) from the sedimented yeast. I find that pouring doesn't work well. I siphon off the spent wort after the yeast has sedimented from a crash cooling. I can't really get all the wort off the yeast, but I get a lot off. To rouse the yeast, I add a slug of the freshly chilled wort from my batch into the starter flask and put it back on the stirrer. That is a happy bunch of yeast when its added to the rest of the wort in an hour or so.

My last several batches have had pretty long lag times. I don't know if it was my allowing the starter to warm for a few hours before pitching or the hydrometer sample full of fresh wort I added to the starter (and put on the stir plate) but, my most recent batch was pitched late Sunday night and come Monday morning I already had blowoff. Yeast seemed much happier.